gardenman

I've used everything in the way of lower cost aquarium lighting at one time or another. The first aquarium lights were the simple metal ones with the long incandescent bulbs. (I dusted one off a while back and used the screw in LED daylight bulbs, but the bulb life was pretty short in that fixture. Likely due to the heat trapped in the fixture.) Then we transitioned to fluorescent bulbs, T-12, T-8, and ultimately T-5. Much better, but you only get a year or so from the tubes. Now LED. I've made my own using LED strips. With the waterproof kind the waterproof coating tends to discolor rather badly over time and dims the lights, so I gave up on them. The non-waterproof kind worked better. Both types tended to go through power supplies rather quickly. I'd get a year, maybe two before the power supply would give up. I've now switched to lower cost options. I like the T-5 shaped shop lights a lot. The 6500 K ones are pretty great. You can daisy chain them together and they seem to last a while. The lower cost "LED aquarium lights" were okay, but I really like the Nicrew SkyLED Plus light. It's pretty cheap, gives a lot of light for a relatively small amount of money, and the plants seem happy with it. I've grown house plants, aquarium plants, orchids, and more under lights for probably fifty years now. I'm using some "real" LED grow lights now on my seedlings with the purple (red/blue) lighting and the geranium and lobelia seedlings are loving them. They're giving the best growth I've ever gotten under lights for terrestrial plants. I snuck a dish of floaters under them to see how they'd do and they're not as happy as the seedlings are oddly enough. That could be a nutrient issue though more than lighting. Based on my experience, I wouldn't bother too much with making your own lighting except for as a hobby. The cost/return just isn't there these days when you look at something like the Nicrew SkyLED Plus. or the T-5 shaped shop lights and what you get for the money. Once my seedlings move outdoors (sometime in May) I'll slide a clear Sterilite container under the red/blue LEDs and see how aquarium plants grow under them. It could be a neat way to increase your plant count.

Over the years, I've used lots of things. A fork, an old toothbrush, an old hair brush, and more. These days I just grab it and yank it out with my hand.

I've had mine since 1/06/2021 and it's still just sitting there and doing nothing. It's not rotting, but it's not growing. I'm still in wait and see mode.

They may be okay. They raise their fish in greenhouses, so I would assume they have heating for the greenhouses. They survived getting clobbered by a hurricane or two, so they likely have generators also. They don't have anything new posted on their forum's blog, but they could be okay. They may be running up a heck of a fuel bill heating the greenhouses, but hopefully they're still doing okay.

Yeah, most people don't realize how many eggs get laid in a typical tank only to get eaten by the fish. Most of the common egg scatterers breed very frequently, but few fry ever survive. Setting up a tank for the eggs to survive in is the first big challenge. There are lots of ways to approach that. The stainless steel mesh used by MickS77 is perfect for smaller fish. Egg crate works well for larger fish, Plants and breeding mops help, but I've seen the adults burrow into plants and mops for the eggs so you still lose some. Marbles are the old-school technique, but the problem with marbles is some fry will die and some food will fall between the marbles and spoil. You can't really take out the marbles without hurting fry and eggs so water quality becomes an issue. It's a great way to protect the eggs, but makes a lot more work for the fish keeper in the long run as maintaining the water quality becomes a headache.

If you've got a handful of serpae or silvertip tetras odds are they're already breeding on a regular basis. They're egg-scatterers and have likely carpeted your tank with eggs on multiple occasions already, but they also are egg eaters and tend to eat them almost as quickly as they're laid. Feeding the parents live food or good quality frozen food will often encourage more spawning. If you're serious about saving the eggs and raising fry, you'll want a way to protect the eggs as they fall to limit predation. Spawning mops, mats of java moss, even mats of hair algae can all work. Old school breeders would carpet the bottom of the tank with marbles a couple of inches deep so the eggs would roll off and down between the marbles where the fish couldn't get to them as easily. For bigger tetras like serpae tetras an egg crate plastic light diffuser can be used to let the eggs fall through the eggcrate to the lower part of the tank while keeping the parents trapped above it. The water level above whatever egg protecting option you choose is important also. If the tetras breed high enough up in the water column, they can circle around and eat the eggs as they slowly fall. If there's only an couple of inches of water above the egg protection stuff it gives them less opportunity to gulp down the eggs as they fall. A female who's ready to spawn will typically look a bit chunkier than normal due to the eggs inside her. Males will color up a bit. Once the eggs have been laid, it's time to move the parents (and any other fish in the tank) out. The fry will hatch out in a few days, feed on their yolk sac for a couple of days and then need food. Lots of food. A hundred or more eggs can be laid per spawn, so there will be lots of hungry little mouths to feed. Pretty much all tetras spawn a lot. And I mean a lot. Over the course of a year a Momma tetra likely lays a thousand or more eggs. The reason we'll not all knee deep in tetras is because they and other fish in the tank then eat the eggs. The fry survival rate in a tank with adult tetras and other fish may be 0.001%. An egg has to be very lucky to survive to the hatching point. The fry then has to be insanely lucky to survive until it's big enough not to be eaten. If you look at a well maintained tank with a school of neon or cardinal tetras in it, you'll notice a few chunkier females. If you watch them closely for a while you'll see them spawn. You'll also see a feeding frenzy emerge as the eggs drop and the other fish in the tank, along with parents, gulp down the eggs. You'll find lots of tanks with big schools of tetras, but in most of those tanks you never find any young fry that have survived. The eggs get eaten, the fry get eaten and the survival rate is very, very low.

Val might not be the best plant for an Easy Planter. Val spreads by runners. The Easy Planter could trap those runners and prevent them from getting established.

You really didn't have to say Godzilla wasn't real. Everyone knows he's a marine creature and not fresh water. He rises from the ocean to devastate Tokyo time after time. You'd really think they'd upgrade their building codes so the buildings would be Godzilla resistant. I guess some people never learn. Back to the plants for a minute, Something closer to the surface would be wise. Live-bearing mothers tend to either have their fry low or high in the tank. Wherever they have them seems to be where the fry choose to hang out afterward. I suspect it's genetic in some manner. If your Momma Mollies are top spawners, then your fry would be exposed. If your Momma Mollies are bottom spawners the fry would be fine. I find livebearers to be unpredictable on where they'll spawn, so it pays to have both high and low cover. Frogbit is a good floating plant that's relatively easy to control but grows well and could provide higher up cover for fry. I've had high spawners in a relatively bare tank and the other fish line up like kids in a school cafeteria waiting for the fry to emerge to gulp them down. It's truly a fish eat fish world out there. The same high spawners in a tank with floating plants had a much higher survival rate. In my experience encouraging your mollies to spawn will be the least of your problems. They'll spawn, and spawn, and spawn. Creating an environment where the fry survive, now that's the challenge.

Yeah, typical potting soils have peat in them which can do things to your water (soften it and lower the pH) that you may not want done to your water. I've used cheap top soil (the stuff that costs like $2 for a 40 lb bag) and then topped it with sand and gravel and it's been great for my pond plants. They're happy. I'm happy. It's a good cheap option for water garden plants. I've never tried it with aquarium plants, but it would probably be okay there also.

You should be advised that some sources claim powerheads move water through a sponge too quickly for it to be effective as a biofilter. According to them, you want a slower movement of water through a sponge filter. I'm not sure I agree with them, but there are many out there who insist you need a slower flow through a sponge filter. Even Matten filters typically have a very low flow rate through them.

Finely ground/powdered food that disperses in a cloud when it hits the water tends to move with the water currents and stay somewhat suspended in the water. It looks largely like a cloud of infusoria if you get it ground finely enough. It even "moves" in the water to some extent due to current and the movement of the fish.

No personal experience, but from what I've heard, they sometimes can't find them. I've seen the adults kept in ten and twenty gallon tanks for breeding to make it easier for the fry to find the parents. The less space the parents have to get away from the fry the easier it is for the fry to find the parents. A 29 gallon tank isn't huge, at least from a human perspective, but to a small fry it might be the Sahara Desert if they're on one side and the adults are on the other.

I doubt that the return would be worth the effort. even if the byproducts were harmless. There are much easier ways to generate CO2. Sugar, yeast, water, and a pinch of baking soda is the classic way. Plop it in a two liter bottle and it'll generate enough CO2 for most tanks for a week. Sometimes longer. When the anti-CO2 crowd talks about we need to move to green energy, they largely ignore the vast amounts of CO2 generated by and used for other means. CO2 is widely used commercially in the soft drink industry. Some/many commercial greenhouses inject CO2 directly into the greenhouses to both help plant growth and kill insects. Every alcoholic drink produces CO2 during fermentation. Every loaf of bread releases CO2 during the rising/baking process. Welders use CO2. Dry ice is CO2 in solid form. Aquarium keepers use CO2. The stuff is everywhere and widely used in vast quantities. I don't know the math, but my guess would be that fossil fuels may produce less than the other sources. It's a very commonly used and produced gas.

There are roughly a gazillion variables when it comes to how many fish you can put into a tank. There is no easy answer. Throw away the inch per gallon rule as a twelve inch Oscar and twelve one-inch neon tetras produce vastly different amounts of waste. If you look at commercial aquaculture, they often stock enormous quantities of fish in relatively small tanks/ponds. The Japanese koi farmers often have insane amounts of fish crowded into their holding tanks. One joked a few years back that if you couldn't walk across a pond without getting wet there weren't enough fish in it. If you have a brand new tank, filter, and system it can support fewer fish than an older established tank and system. Planted tanks can hold more fish than a bare tank. Surface area matters also. Those really tall tanks have less surface area for gas exchange and can safely house fewer fish. How much you feed the fish and how often you feed them matters. Erring on the side of too few is wiser when you're starting out and as the tank gets more and more established add a few more here and there.

Oddly enough, I was never allergic to live blood worms. Back when I kept marine fish I'd hand feed them to my mandarin and rock beauty one worm at a time. No issues at all. The freeze-dried ones are a whole different story though. (That's been years ago, so maybe I've developed the allergy since then?)

Most of those filters appear to be made from the molds/production line that Marineland used a few years back. They're sold under a gazillion names, but they look like the older Marineland canister filters in nearly every respect. This happens sometimes with overseas manufacturers. Companies will hire a manufacturer to make their product, but then when the number ordered is produced, the manufacturer will continue to churn them out and sell them to other suppliers under different names. Many of those who've bought those filters rave about them. I don't use one, but I've considered it in the past.

I have way more trouble with the freeze-dried than the frozen. The freeze-dried trigger a runny nose, sneezing and just overall allergy misery. The frozen give me no issues at all. Maybe it's because I don't physically handle the frozen? I just plop them out into a small bowl of water and then after they're thawed I dump them into the tank.

The freeze-dried blood worms trigger my allergies something awful. The frozen ones are fine, but the freeze-dried ones just kill me.

I got a fish order through an online seller a few years ago that came in August with cold packs and the water was in the low fifties. One of the twenty fish (a platy) was already dead, but the rest were alive, barely. Everything but one oto died over the next few days. The seller only promised live delivery, so he only offered a refund for the price of the one platy. Suffice to say I never did business with them again. If the temp dips much lower you're likely to have problems based on my experience. Temperatures in the wild tend to stay fairly moderate without big swings. You're already at sixty which would have me pretty nervous. Desperate times call for desperate measures. You could put candles very near to your tank to add some heat. Some extra heat is better than none. If you have an open bottom metal stand, a candle or two (or ten) put under the tank could help warm it also. Not too close as you don't want to shatter the glass but a foot or so under the tank should be okay. Candles can make handy emergency heaters. Back in the seventies/eighties after the first energy crisis, some people built homes with so much insulation you could literally heat the homes with candles. (The air quality was horrible though which is why you don't see it these days.) Heat rises so putting a few candles under a tank could give it a nice boost, or at least slow heat loss.

I don't really get stingrays. They're absurdly expensive. They get huge. They can seriously injure you with their stinger. They need enormous tanks. And they just lie there most of the time like a floor mat. Maybe if I kept them I'd feel differently, but the odds of me keeping them is zero. Kudos to those who love them, but I'm not one of those people. I want more from a fish than it being an expensive, hard to feed floor mat that could seriously injure me. They just don't do anything for me.

The aquarium hobby can come in handy also. I live in a one bathroom older home and we were having ten people over for Christmas. Christmas morning the pipe feeding water to the toilet split and started to flood the basement. I was able to shut the valve quickly to prevent major issues, but there was no water to the toilet which would have been a problem with ten people coming. I had no spare copper pipe or fittings on hand (I do now) so I couldn't fix it and calling a plumber on Christmas morning would have been insanely expensive if I could get one at all. An old filter had tubing that had an inner diameter the same as the outer diameter of the copper pipe. I cut out the damaged length of pipe, slid the tubing about six inches up on either end of the cut off pipe and secured it with a couple of clamps and we had a functioning toilet again. Aquariums to the rescue! I have a couple of small electric space heaters I can use if my big heater fails and should the power go out, I have a kerosene heater that uses no power and can pretty much heat the house for a full day if need be. I'm buying some of the nano air pumps to have on hand also.

Tetramin Plus is my staple food. It's been around forever and my fish do well with it. I can get seven ounces for less than $8, so it's very affordable. My fish get frozen blood worms, shrimp pellets, freeze-dried tubifex worms, and other stuff besides, but as a basic, off the shelf food, the Tetramin Plus works for me. I don't always get it through Amazon, but I've bought the seven ounce containers through them 13 times according to Amazon, so I use a fair amount of it. I've also bought it locally, through Chewy, That Pet Place, and Drs Foster and Smith when they were still around. I've got a new container coming today. It's a good, off-the-shelf, no brainer food for me.

I'd recommend calling local aquarium clubs/societies and asking if anyone has a female they'd trade for two young males. Super Reds are a fairly commonly bred fish by hobbyists and someone likely has more females than they need but could use some fresh males for genetic variability. The people running the local clubs will know who shows up at their sales with Super Reds and can get you in touch with them.

You can pump the siphon starter on them a few times from time to time to circulate some fresh water through them. It won't move a lot of water, but it'll get a little bit moving and that can help keep the bacteria alive.

Moving the fry could help them grow faster as they wouldn't have to scrounge for food as much. In a breeding box, the food is right there. They should do fine either way though.